What's on your workbench today?

Such a beauty !!!

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Jeeze, that looks really nice. Very simple and clean.

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Next build has kicked off. This one is a little more out there than my last. It’s a compact FRL 1800 that uses no key longer than 1.75u and if you used something non-sculpted and didn’t care about legends, you’d only need the keycaps from a standard ANSI 104 key layout. This plate is just Home Depot tempered hardboard, and that’s also the plan for the rest of the sandwich layers, so I’ll solder the matrix to hotswap sockets in the event the entire case disintegrates.

Electronics will be KMK on an RP2040. Switches will be Gateron green. Keycaps will be DSA with homebrew laser dye-sub legends (pics are test pieces). Stabilizers will be…elsewhere. :joy:




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Interesting choice of material! I was wondering about hardboard the other day: is it possible to get some that is smooth on both sides?

Test fitting the Fresnel PCB and its plate in my Frog.
Mistakes were made on the plate but nothing that a Dremel could not solve :stuck_out_tongue:

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:heart_eyes:

Does it work!?

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One PCB enters the bootloader fine, the other is not stable and I strongly suspect a short on the MCU pins.
Thanks god I added an e-fuse in the design and it looks to control the amount of current to the MCU just fine, I think otherwise the MCU would be dead :slight_smile:
Will see if I can revive the PCB by just reflowing the MCU pins.

Now for the whole design I don’t know yet, have to write a firmware for it.

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And I need to try to trade one of my F13 frogs for an F12 :slight_smile:

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Don’t press the trigger yet, this is a very first revision and it may not work :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m sure that it is, as some lasercut art my wife ordered from Turkey arrived sandwiched in it, and IIRC that used to be how you could tell tempered from untempered. I don’t think the bigboxes in the US carry it, but “s2s” hardboard would be nice.

What I did grab is some cheap Chalkboard/Whiteboard stuff that is a little over 4mm thick and smooth on both sides (and you can pick between white or black!). It could be useful for someone with a beefier laser. My baby 5w diode only got about 3/4 of the way, though I may try again, adjusting the focus between passes.

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Update on obtaining wood sheets for plate: I was able to obtain 3 sheets of basswood 6 x 24 x 1/16 inches. They were $6.49 each from Hobby Lobby. Searching online, it seems that JoAnn (another hobby/craft store) also carries similar products, and I mentioned Michael’s earlier.

I’m a bit busy with other things this month, so it might yet be a few weeks before I get a chance to attempt to cut some of these into plates, but I will definitely post updates once I have tried.

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Remixed Case and Knob for the Sofle adapted to heat inserts. RGB strip for Underglow is also a must have later

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Making progress on the hardboard nostabs “nowhere near 96%” board. Matrix is wired and working, usable keymap is in place, and beginning to zap the infusible ink onto the keycaps, though I underestimated the wobble of the laser’s gantry and ruined the aesthetics (such as they are) of the CapsLock key by not securing it. The glyph still looks vaguely like a lock though, so we’ll reevaluate when the board is done and I can decide if the overall venture was enough of a success to warrant buying spare keycaps (EDIT: Eff it. I did a big dumb oval as a cover-up tattoo on Caps Lock… at least the edges are sharp). Going to have to buy SOMETHING for the case sides if I want them to be more than just screws in 3d-printed feet or laser cut popsicle sticks, but that could be as as simple as longer screws and more hardboard.




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What the heck is that pink Raspberry Pi Pico? I thought they only use green solder mask.

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They sell the actual RP2040 chips to anybody, so this is a clone with USB-C. I have some others that are a little more different, but “pink and C” seem to be the only changes to this one.

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Ok, that’s exactly what it looked like. Which means the silkscreen logo is a trademark violation, and a lost opportunity to advertise where one might obtain pink picos. (Somewhere on Aliexpress, I guess)

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Got some progress here, including some advice to use a couple of tiny dots as registers to set up multiple keys on the laser. I’m doing nine at a time now. I need to make a jig I guess, but eyeballing the laser’s framing is now doable within the quality constraints of the rest of the board, lol. This entire project could be redone in more premium materials and with more time put into tooling and could come out really nice, I think. As it is, I’m already pleased.

Also… PURPLE!

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Built my Weikav Record today. Went with Hyperglide Blacks and GMK Sparta. Used the stabs that came with it and just wiped off the lube on there and relubed them. Looks like my phone overdid the colors a bit.

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I feel you on this, my phone always makes the colors seem a bit off from what they look like IRL. Then the lighting in my computer/keeb room is very warm so pretty much all of my pics come out looking different than whatever would IRL. Also the Record looks great with Sparta, very nice combo!

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Yeah, it’s kind of annoying to have to mess with the picture to get something close to reality. The cameras are all so determined to make pictures that “pop” that things like legends and particular shades all look wrong, and only sometimes “better.”

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